1 - Indiscreet anatomies and protogay aesthetes in Roderick Hudson and The Europeans

Summary

Those [readers] who look for “and they lived together happily ever after” at the end of the last chapter of any of [Henry James's] novelettes will be disappointed.

(Review of Roderick Hudson, New York Herald, 1875)

It is now common to advance Henry James's first acknowledged novel, Roderick Hudson (1875), as also his first significant foray into the representation of different modes of masculinity and, indeed, of male homosexuality. Robert Drake has recently canonized this narrative of “sublimated desire” in The Gay Canon (1998), predicting that “the gay reader” (comfortably unproblematized) will discover in Roderick Hudson an unfulfilled “love story” between two young American men: the titular hero, an ill-fated would-be genius as a sculptor, and his wealthy patron, Rowland Mallet. Offering a more theoretical account, Hugh Stevens stakes his claim that James was “already a gay novelist” in his early thirties (a literary not a biographical claim) on the ways in which Roderick Hudson begins “explor[ing] the workings of same-sex desire, and the difficulties of admitting such desires, within a cultural formation marked by homosexual prohibition,” albeit before the articulation of “the homosexual” as a pathologized, criminalized type in late Victorian science and jurisprudence.